Roundup

If you’re anything like me, your dietary habits have gone straight to hell courtesy of Thursday’s gorging, and you’ve taken up casual fasting and desperate walks to restore your metabolism to more modest pre-Thanksgiving states of ingestion. Which isn’t to say that this regimen is entirely successful or that the wintry chill has made any sizable impact upon the tendency to hibernate. But it is, after all, the intentions that count, even when laziness threatens to lambada dance with your appetite, which remains mystified that you had not one, but two giant plates of dinner. Yes, Thanksgiving is indeed the American way. But fortunately, no loved ones were harmed or screamed at on this end.

Temporal proximities being what they are, this means, of course, that toothless book lists, devoid of tomes that take chances or that make hard dips into genre, are par for the course. No doubt this ledger will be measured against better books in the days to come. But I must wonder what What is the What, published in October 2006, is doing on a list ostensibly celebrating 2007’s hot titles. Could this be a delicate stratagem to woo Eggers once again to the Review‘s page? A bargaining chip or a true sign that Tanenhaus is out of touch?

End of the year lists aren’t so superficial, are they? Mr. Mitchelmore lists a few reasons why he likes them.

This is why I slightly fear playing Guitar Hero 3. Bad enough that pounding power chords on an axe causes me to forget that I am not Yngwie. But when a trusty Stratocaster is replaced by fantastic plastic, there are considerably more ignoble maneuvers I will attempt in an effort to have fun.

I’m on the lookout for podcasts that don’t sound like FM radio (or people trying desperately to get on FM radio; thank you, Adam Curry, for spawning that plague upon this medium of possibilities), but that involve real people expressing their natural enthusiasm. Movies You Should See is a fun little podcast I’ve recently discovered. Not only does their dog bark in the background, but there is a good deal of arguments over the pedantic.